Global consequences of a local Casimir force: Adhered cantilever

Abstract

Although stiction is a cumbersome problem for microsystems, it stimulates investigations of surface adhesion. In fact, the shape of an adhered cantilever carries information of the adhesion energy that locks one end to the substrate. We demonstrate here that the system is also sensitive to the dispersion forces that are operative very close to the point of contact, but their contribution to the shape is maximum at about one third of the unadhered length. When the force exceeds a critical value the cantilever does not lose stability but it settles at smaller unadhered length, whose relation to adhesion energy is only slightly affected by the force. Our calculations suggest to use adhered cantilevers to measure the dispersion forces at short separations, where other methods suffer from jump-to-contact instability. Simultaneous measurement of the force and adhesion energy allows the separation of the dispersion contribution to the surface adhesion.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Influence of random roughness on the Casimir force at small separations
• Roughness correction to the Casimir force at short separations: Contact distance and extreme value statistics
• Transition from Casimir to van der Waals force between macroscopic bodies
• Roughness correction to the Casimir force beyond perturbation theory

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Maxwell Eigenmode approach to the Casimir-Lifshitz Torque
• Edge Wetting: Steady State of Rivulets in Wedges